Everything not fictional here is real

Monthly Archives: May 2006

Ok..”Otis Redding read in the “Reading Eagle” about the new Building they’re building over there on Reed Street, across from the Bank in Red Bank. (There’s even talk of a new avenue). Meanwhile, in Berne, the burnt-out “Incinerated Cinema” fired AshleySinderman, whose latest box-office dud, “The Thin Man, Infatuated” was projected to lose mega-Marks in Luzerne, after sinking in Helsinki. In better news, an efficient Relief Op has yesterday’s roof collapse-ees all in tents…(and “Porpoises are FISH, for all intents and purposes”..that from the Science Syndicate) “Baby-Face and theUnadulterated Juveniles” kinda wet their diapers at “Vipers” in a hyped-out-of-all-proportion distortion-fest of a debut. (Their rebuttal..”What’ll “The Subtleties” gross in the grocery’s cut-out racks?..Ever thought to print THAT?”) Foreign long-range forecast calls for rain. Oh’n Abysynians have opinions on MacD‘s new Happy-Meal power-toy, the Ever-ready Hurdy-Gurdy…”wishy-washy“…topsy-turvy“..head the list. A “distraught” draftsman at I M Pei thwarted intense intervention efforts in a tense ten-hour stand-off high above 42nd Street. The herd around Times Square heard his last words “Pei don’t pay!” first, and seconds later…a penniless THUD. (Or was it a Thwunk?) Sad. Moving on, Otis is reading “Housing starts up…Start-ups shut down...Leak of the Week–“Otis Elevator hires a hired-gun,eyes new ad blitz and it’s “Get High with Otis!” “Red Bank back in the black”…”Dauphin County Dolphins spawn all over neck-and-neck rivals the Susquehanna Indigenous Peoples in a Mem-Day blowout sail-away-to-Victory. And in the wake of death threats, sleeping giant Olive Garden (79billion, 2005) posts live guards armed with small arms and live ammunition…oh, and live gardenias to soften the effect…”You asleep yet, kid?”

So now we got the main intersection in town shut down …while the boys and girls try to turn a “T” into an “O”. Figure, we couldn’t handle a “T”, what’s the chances we’ll do any better with a dumb circle. It still depends on thoughtfulness, respect for the law, and eye-brain co-ordination to make it work, so frankly, I don’t expect much. The signs went up a couple days ago…no “Detour->”, just “road closed, fuck you“. They were covered with christmas-wrapping paper (looked like that, anyway) for about ten minutes till the scotch tape blew off..but hey, it’s a Party…about twenty big-shots standing around all day, each holding his “blue-print” page. Guess they don’t trust to give them all to one guy. We’re top-notch “supervisors”. Had lots of experience. They used to mow the grass in front of my house…a three “man” crew. Thailand mows, Moses invests (his time trying to read the paper and chew gum), and the Top of the Pyramid stops by once a day to, i know?…go over the instructions on the gum wrapper, or mebbe look for deals in the paper, cheap flights to America, where hard workers like him can get rich overnight. Right.

Back in ’57 when I was speed-reading the Encyclopedia Britannica, though somewhat daunted by 120+ pounds of print-stuff, I none-the-less considered the task do-able. (Can’t believe they called ’em “zygotes“..typical grown-ups..hide the sexy part till near the end!) Anyway, several years have passed, not uneventfully, (“Lincoln’s been shot!–full story->)”. And after watching the sun come up on another sleepless night spent trying to catch up on even my “five-stars” watch-list, I must conclude that for a blogger, the expectation of riveted reader devotion is something of a dream best abandoned. Riveting reading matter abounds, “Ve ode ech!” (“and how!” in a beautiful example of a hebrew expression which models literally the odd construction of the english “original”–gotta look that up?). Gobbling it all up, even with my speed-reading take-a-bath-in-the-colors-of-the-letters skill is simply an intractable challenge. I’ve seen the best minds of my generation howling their precious “why didn’t I think of that?” posts into the No Comments cyber-vacuum without succumbing to depression. Somehow they get over it, and I will too. My new goal is simply to be competitively riveting. OK, RIVETS.. We’ll follow their progress from early hand-made iron rivets in bridge construction down to the new Craftsman XJ/99 Pop rivet gun/coffee maker/rPod with 200 gigs of onboard rivets/bolivian gold/technoschlock. I shall be anonymously “book-marked”, grown men will be late for work, and women will read me with one hand…but if it don’t happen, I WILL TRY TO UNDERSTAND! And to save you all some precious time, here are some “zygotes” right on the first page…

“I Know when I’m licked…all over!”…(Lot’s wife, quoted in “Salty Last Words“..op-ed piece from The Sodomite Sentinel, final edition.“Just don’t look down!”…(Last thoughts of countless cartoon characters on blissfully walking off a cliff into thin air, as the music continues cheerfully for another two or three measures…

I was happy before I discovered xanga a couple months ago. I was working, of course, but also inventing and building (real) gadgets, writing songs, drawing cartoons, propagating cactuses, eating, sleeping, you know…real life.The people I know liked my endeavors, and told me so. Never once stared blankly then mumbled “No Comment!”But that appearantly wasn’t enough…I coveted a “wider audience”I shoulda known better.Back when I was learning to play five-string banjo, I discovered a captive audience…our herd of Jersey cows. I had only to set up in a corner of the field and start playing. “If you pluck it, they will come.” As long as I didn’t stop for a half-a-beat they were rapt. The young stock, first-calf heifers, usually lay down in the front rows, so their mom (and her mom, and her mom) could get a better look at this free entertainment. Like Donald Fagen with his “learning meditation…so far, so good“. Did I mention, don’t stop. Yeah, ten, fifteen seconds of silence and “ya lost ’em“. There they go, presumably in search of some other banjo player on the other side of the hill. Short attention span, these Jerseys, but we needed the milk. And so as not to be species-ist, the same damn thing happened when I volunteered to play at the psych-wards of both of the local hospitals. My personal goals were un-assailably altruistic. To wake the doggone catatonics, level out the manic-depressives, and optomise the pessimists. Well yeah, once again, as long as you don’t stop to tune, or to god-forbid allow a few seconds of artistic silence between “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” (in retropect mebbe not an appropriate play-list inclusion) and “Long Black Veil” (ditto, hey, I was young!). No, you started from absolute Scratch on each song. (I learned to segue all the songs together into one hour-long medley, thereby mastering the art of transposition between any two arbitrary keys). So what’s the moral of these cow-tales, these loony-tunes? Nothing, I guess, ‘cept that it SCARRED ME FOR LIFE! That’s all. I am constantly searching for that special cow who will moo me “Hi, Johnny..whas up? I looooved your last tune…think you could play it again for my daughter here?...Or the odd catatonic who wakes briefly if only to suggest, “Ok, soporific, granted, but your juxtaposition of Weltschmertz and Serene Acceptance was a bit jarring..” Maybe I should just hack the “New Weblog Entry” code so it just posts continually, no “submit”, no date-stamp, and of course no horrible “ADD COMMENTS” camped out there at the bottom to glare smugly up at me day after day. Nah, easier just to quit while I’m ahead. I got over cows and (trying to think of the proper word, there but for (or with a little?) fortune go I) “troubled souls“, I can get over xanga-unvalidation-syndrome. “JUST SAY NO (COMMENTS), PLEASE“?

So this morning I do a job in Ramat Gan, actually a part of Tel Aviv, up on the porch of a five-story apartment building, stretching cloth overhead against the sun, and it goes ok.. I only broke one little statue’s head off and she paid me, even rounded up to 700 shekels from 650 so I left and found a gas station, and got a beer and drove home, paid two months of overdue phone bills, ate a chicken breast in pita, talked to my buddy there about when israel will finally become the 51st state, and came home fed my cat and laid down and fell asleep………….

And I dreamed I was walking along this newly made highway through a pine forest in Arizona, which told me like it might be a dream, but that’s where the statcounter said I was with the red dot on the map, and so in the middle of the road was a construction barrel and on top was a board with cat food, just like my cat food, and MY kitten, happily eating, so i pet her a little and she’s acting real hungry, but i gotta know who’s feeding the little schnorer and so we’re right in front of a sort of cabin with a hedge fence and i go over to the fence and around each corner of the house come the two residents, a nice enough gentleman about 40 and a younger tall girl in a full-coverage yellow dress, this is MS Paint YELLOW, no details, with dark hair, also as drawn by me in MS-Paint and she looks a bit unsure of herself,(mebbe cause I can’t draw for shit) but I smile and somehow convey without un-intended accusation the question does she feed the kitten and “Sure” she says, she does… “every…” (here her husband (i assume) looks at her, he’s got a shovel, and says “couple days” so she says “couple a days”. She continues, “see, a… “lady“, he volunteers… “Yeah a lady came by a… “few weeks ago“..(him again).. “few weeks ago and she had a “box“, “yeah, a box, by the way her name was “esther” yeah esther, (this was because at that point I was thinking of how I got the kitten which was a mystery which did involve a women whose name i didn’t know..),”and in the box were these “kittens“(he’s still giving her all the answers..) yeah kittens and they were brown and grey and black..” (Here her husband looked at her like “you take it from here”, so she continued, as he went behind the house), “brown and grey and black….. and brown and grey and black…brown and grey and black and brown and grey and black….” In my mind the box is just getting fuller and fuller, and we’re starting to need to assume multiple cat-mothers and after a while i see the box is starting to tip over, she cant hold it anymore, but she keeps on ..”brown and grey and black..” so I try to help her out and suggest, ..”And so then you…” and she freezes! Just totally freezes and gives me a look like “that’s my husbands job, of course you could probably do it too, maybe i’d like that but not here not now that’s my husbands job, then she starts to say “that’s my husbands job”…”that’s my husbands job” out loud, and again she’s stuck and i start to think that even though i was proud of myself that i gave him a real big smile too, that he would come around the corner any minute and like assume the worst, even though i was on the outside of the fence, so i said “yup, that’s your husband’s job” as he came around the corner and I pointed to the shovel and thought like maybe it’s time to fade this dream….

Noticed quite a few folks lately been reporting having the same DREAM. Appearantly normal people…gushing about their up-coming trip to the HOLY LAND, or their ANCESTRAL HOME, or whatever. I’m like in favor of dreaming. Dreaming is an essential part of a balanced diet of…My reaction is an innocent “sh-T’he’Yeh ba’Ree!…which is literally “you should (go and) be healthy” That’s what it said in my phrase book. So when Gershon the Stupid came by my little hut the Third time asking for money for a new axle for his dumb tractor which he had blindly rammed into my VW bug…this time limping from some new “farmer faux paux”, I, in an act of mercy, told him to “go and be healthy!” (I thought). He tried to grab my neck, I diverted him and slammed the door. Ran to my phrase book…Sure enough…I hadn’t seen it, the second entry “colloq…”whatever, you’re beyond help!”. Well I’ll be! Yeah, I’ll be a one-man campaign for historic-preservation of the holy tongue. Like I said, I sincerely wish you all the best, and as an aid to LUCID DREAMING, I enclose this TRAVEL-PAC of Things you might not have heard, you being busy with Dreaming and all that…Some of my complaints might seem trivial, but put together they yield a pervading atmosphere of (what we professionals like to call) “dumb-ness” which sticks to your skin like a ten-hour shift in a restaurant kitchen. 1)House numbers–Forget about house numbers! A typical block in Tel Aviv has two or three official numbers…for 30 doors. Numbers are I guess prohibitively expensive. You drive the whole length of TA and you get to 297, I think. Of course the numbers aren’t visible on most of the buildings. But then, neither are the street names..2)Street names…THEM we got a lot of! You drive two blocks, you get a name change. Too-many-heros-syndrome. Not counting Rehov Ma’ze (“WHAT’S THIS?” Street). Somehow, against nature and all odds, they managed to set up the sign-posts so you can never read the name of the cross-street till you pass it. (Not that anybody would’ve left you turn anyway!) Plus the English name’s probably spelled some absurdly abominable atrocity you wouldn’t recognize in 50 years. Park, get out and walk!3)Oh, There’s NO PARKING! Oh yeah, on the sidewalk, like those other 23 cars, who somehow don’t get tickets, you think you’re ok till you see the crumpled note under your (broken) wiper blade.4) So pay the ticket…Only problem is the Post Office is closed, (course the sign in the door says “Open”, so you go around the block seven times, park on the sidewalk, get another ticket, walk three blocks of Hell to be belittled by the grubby Russian guard who’s there to grubily belittle you..”Sagur!” (closed, dickhead!) He just LOVES saying that.5)Oh well, at least I can grab a bite at McDonalds. Yes you can, in principle. But at a wear-and-tear price to your remaining sanity. For a measly 8 bucks you get a hamburger and fries, get to read the Isra-babel splash-screen on the customer side of the cash register “THE BEST FLIES IN THE WORD!” (Check for yourself if you think I’m making that up..) About one customer in four bothers to take his tray and his junk back to the bins. The rest are screaming drivel into their stupid cell-phones. So enjoy your meal..”You want that to-go?”..Yeah, fast and far away…6)But there’s NO ESCAPE. Our “road-system” is a pathetic interlocking network of Choke-Points, joined by brief “choke-connectors” which are really “enforcement-opportunities” The goal is appearantly an average top speed of about 5 MPH, which give the cops time to chew gum, shoot the shit with each other and examine your inspection sticker’s month of expiration on the fly.7) You decide to vist a guy on your way home. He’s an average joe, so he lives in a white box-thingy, with a 3000 dollar front door, with NO HANDLE on the outside, but that’s ok, It’s inside his Great Wall, created in part by the Four-ton electric meter concrete protector obelisk, the 3 ton Water-meter protector monstrosity, and of course no bell. No way to get his attention. You try to call on your stupid cell phone. Busy. You stand in the rain 5 minutes and GIVE THE FUCK UP.8) Home Sweet Home. Curl up with your phrase-book, this time English=Hebrew…lets see, “Where’s the freaking ‘light unto the nations’?” (B’va’ka’sha, ei’fo ha-Or le’goyim?) It was all just a dream!